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Most of the URLS are links with domain.com/%20?iframe=true&width=100%&height=100% at the end of it or links that were entered incorrectly on there page.

Most are coming from here. http://www.a-zip.com/Leather%20Verizon%20iPhone%20Cases

They also copied part of the description from the page as well.

Question 1: Should we 301 redirect all these links to the proper pages they are trying to point to? It's mainly the "%20?iframe=true&width=100%&height=100%" that doesn't exist on our site which gives the 404. So if we did a 301 or a URL rewrite to remove the extra garbage at the end it, then it would be pointing to the correct page. But is this the best solution? I have no control what others do on their site...

Question 2: Whats the best approach to take from stopping/preventing these sties linking back to our site. Most are backlinks from foreign sites that look like garbage and have low or no PR. There are many other sites that take our content and use it on there site which can cause duplicate content?

Sorry If I am asking the same question twice but this is currently our biggest concern and we need a viable solution.

4 Responses

I think you hit the nail right on the head. It really depends on what you want to do with these links - if you want to salvage the link juice coming in to the site, I'd watch your inbound links and redirect them to pages so that you capture some of the link juice. On the other hand, if you don't want these links and you're concerned they may harm you with the latest algorithm changes (penguin), then I'd leave them pointing at 404 pages and not worry about it. You may even want to do a preemptive reinclusion request as many have recommended, telling Google you're not responsible for these links and you don't want them. Leaving them pointing to 404 pages sends a strong signal you don't want these links.

It's normal for websites to have some 404s on them - just make sure the ratio is normal and healthy and you don't have something extremely out of the ordinary happening here on your site.

Thank you for your response. We'll have to do some research I guess on the ones with incorrect URLs pointing back and determine to 301 them or not.

But we are not sure what to do with existing ones that have massive amount of links pointing to a single URL of ours which don't 404. One site has over 10k links to a single page of ours. Is there a way to report them or somehow let the search engines know not to affiliate them with us since they might be penalizing us? I have tried contacting some of the hosting companies in past, especially for ones that copy our content but they are usually overseas and don't take any action.

You can try a preemptive reinclusion request to let Google know this isn't your doing and you don't want the links, you want them to be discarded. But have you seen any negative impact from these links? It's only natural that sitewide links will exist on the web. The problem is when they are highly spammy, overly optimized anchor text, completely out of context, not relevant to your site, etc. Do you think these sitewide links are of malicious intent or are a natural result of how the web works?

Well we have lost traffic and dropped in ranking right on the 25/26th with the dip in traffic shown on Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. We have never paid for any link building. So we never authorized these links and its either a competitor hurting us (i might be a little paranoid on this one) or natural result of how the web due to the nature of our industry. We write our own product descriptions, etc, and see them all over by just searching for parts of the description, sad part is when they rank higher for content we wrote.

ifonearcade.com is one example site that is showing up with thousands of links pointing to one url of ours. This is considered a garbage site to me from a user prospective im not sure what search engines think. They have no page rank but have many pages indexed in Google.

Any suggesting on what to do with ifonearcade.com would help with giving me an approach to the similar sites linking back to us.

We will definitely do a preemptive reinclusion request listing these sites and explaining the situation in the meantime.

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